


The Girl in the Tower

by TheColorBlue



Category: Tangled (2010)
Genre: Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Imprisonment, Isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Mother taught her how to use a crossbow.</i><br/><i>The day that Bastion climbed through the window, escaping highwaymen that had chased him into the forest—Rapunzel nearly killed him.</i> </p><p>Inspired by a version of the film <i>Tangled</i> that was never produced, called <a href="http://magickedteacup.tumblr.com/post/64257665981/artoftangled-dan-cooper-digital-dan-cooper"><i>Rapunzel</i></a>. The concept art at the top of the post linked was basically the jumping point for this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl in the Tower

Mother taught her how to use a crossbow.

She said, if ever Rapunzel saw anyone climbing through that window that wasn’t her, to shoot them. Immediately. You could not imagine the kind of horrible things that the monsters out there would do to a young girl…

The day that Bastion climbed through the window, escaping highwaymen that had chased him into the forest—Rapunzel nearly killed him.

\---

Rapunzel has lived in her tower for her entire life. 

She spends her days reading, climbing the rafters of her tower, practicing with her crossbow, doing chores of cleaning, cooking, laundry, and also painting murals. She has never seen anyone’s face aside from her mothers, but there are stories in her books. They call girls, or maidens, “beautiful,” and young men “handsome,” and highwaymen “coarse” and “ugly.” They call kings “aging” and “wise of face.” They call small children “impish” or “cherubic,” depending on the kind of children. 

Rapunzel has never seen aging except the kind apparent in her own reflection, and in the clockwork wrinkles of her mother’s face, the graying at her temples, the kinds of lines and colors that fade each morning when her mother sings over Rapunzel’s hair at breakfast, that slowly creep back over her mother’s face by evening, and that vanish again with the light of the morning sun, and the light of her daughter’s hair. 

In her life, Rapunzel has only ever seen two faces. Some of her books are illustrated, but they are the kind of illustrations that don’t have much direct resemblance to reality. She has to take the adjectives of the stories for what they’re worth, placed next to pictures that are more symbols than mirror reflections of the world. 

When she paints the faces of her storybook characters into her murals, she talks to them. To the maidens, she says that they are beautiful. To the princes, she says that they are handsome. Even as she says the words, she is not sure that she knows what they mean. She tries to imagine what it would be like to look at another, real person. The concept of it is so foggy that finally she gives up and, anyway, it doesn’t really matter. If any living person were ever to make it up the tower who was not her mother, they could only be a monster, some evil person after the magic of her hair, and Rapunzel would have to shoot them on sight. 

The faces in her murals aren’t real, but she finds that it’s comforting to talk to them anyway, and to know that they’re not real. She practices talking to princes and princesses and kings. She talks to honest woodsmen and men and women seeking their fortunes. When her mother is away, and Rapunzel is all alone, she swings on a swing made of her hair strung from the rafters, and she talks to no one who is real. 

\---

Bastion is a sailor on leave. 

That’s what he tells her, after she bandages up the wound her arrow had put though his left thigh. When he’d dropped to the floor, crying out in pain, Rapunzel had dropped her crossbow too and covered her ears with her hands. She had started crying and this stranger’s blood had leaked onto the floor. She was so afraid. She should have killed him and rolled his body off the ledge of the window, and she was so afraid. 

He’d lain on the floor, breathing shallowly, his hands around his thigh, and Rapunzel had stood up, very quietly, and gotten a knife, and also cloth for bandages, and she said, “I’m going to help you. Try to hurt me or to touch my hair and I’ll kill you. And if I don’t kill you, my mother certainly will.” Her voice had barely trembled with the words. “My mother will be back in three hours time. She’ll kill you.”

The stranger, big man though he was, had lain on the floor and whimpered. Rapunzel did not know why, and she did not know why her heart felt wrung out like a rag. 

Rapunzel had neatly cut out the arrow, and bandaged up the wound, and mopped up the blood, used perfumed water to cover up the smell of the blood, and covered the stained wood with the rug. 

The man doesn’t say anything until the end, and then he says “thank you,” and “my name is Bastion.” 

Rapunzel just nods quickly, and then she makes a sling with her hair, and makes Bastion get into it, tells him to leave and never come back, and then laboriously lowers him down to the earth outside the tower. 

After he leaves, Rapunzel races to her bedroom. She pushes her bed to one side to expose an unpainted patch of wall. 

She wants to remember what that man looks like. The first man she has ever seen. She shuts her eyes tightly, slowly breathing in, then out, remembering. Then she opens them again, and raises her charcoal stick. She draws the hulking figure of him. She draws a crude representation of his face. She tries to remember. 

Then she pushes her bed back to cover the drawing. 

Mother must never know, she thinks, feeling faint and strange and sick, and then she puts her charcoals away, and then she goes to prepare supper for her mother. 

Her mother comes home. 

The sun sets. 

The sun rises again, and her mother sings the familiar song, “you are my forever, my dearest one,” while carding her hands through shimmering, golden hair. 

Her mother goes out again, and Bastion is lucky, because that is when he climbs up the tower again. He climbs up the side with nothing except his bare hands and the uneven stones of the tower’s sides, and when Rapunzel stares at him, he smiles ruefully and says, the other sailors were always calling him a kind of monkey, the way he shimmied up and down to put up or take down the sails. 

He says that he wants to help her, the girl locked in a tower. 

She bites her lip. 

She says: “My name is Rapunzel.” 

The words feel like a strange echo in her empty chest. They feel like the end of something; they are the death of something, perhaps the death of the good, obedient little daughter, the birth of a wicked, disobedient daughter, but _oh_ she is hungry. She is so hungry for something—for another face, another voice, even if for only a few hours. 

She steps back and lets Bastion walk into the circular room, into her tower. 

She watches him like someone dying of thirst, stumbling upon water. 

She will be careful.

She will never let her mother know.

**Author's Note:**

> Because I never saved the links for any of the articles/work, I'm going to have to be general in regards to Tangled's early production, but things I can't take credit for:  
> -proto-type Flynn being called Bastion and being something of a cuddly-bear.  
> -Alan Menken really wrote a song called "You Are My Forever" that would be sung first by Mother Gothel, and then reprised by Bastion ([x](http://jimhillmedia.com/contributors1/b/jim_hilll/archive/2009/06/22/monday-mouse-watch-rapunzel-revealed-a-g-force-sequel.aspx)).  
> -the bit about the murals and Rapunzel talking to her murals was really discussed in concepting for the story.  
> -the bit about Rapunzel drawing Bastion on her wall is interesting because I extrapolated that detail from seeing a storyboard sequence where Mother Gothel, suspicious about changes in Rapunzel's moods, goes searching in the murals of Rapunzel's tower, and then, behind the bed, sees _something_ , the crude drawing of a hulking man if I remember correctly, that really shocks her.
> 
> I don't anticipate continuing this fic, at the moment. :O It's something I'll have to think about.


End file.
